March 16, 1997 EDITOR: Michael Armstrong PUBLISHER: Walter Radtke CONTENTS: EDITORIAL SECTION............................... Michael Armstrong THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE (PART 2)..................David Talbott THE VENUS COMET (3)................................. Wal Thornhill THE ELECTRIC SNAKE................................._The Economist_ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- EDITORIAL SECTION By Michael Armstrong (mikamar at e-z.net) Quote of the day: One of the reasons, I believe, that knowledge is in a state of useless overproduction is that it is strewn all over the place, spoken in a thousand competitive voices. Its insignificant fragments are magnified all out of proportion, while its major and world-historical insights lie around begging for attention. There is no throbbing, vital center. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. It is a common attitude in our time that truth is relative. You have your truth and I have mine. Mine is just as good as yours, ISN'T IT?. As a dedicated scholar, why shouldn't I just cling to my truth, be "broadminded" and let you go your way with yours? And then we can both play that popular game of competing to come up with more irrelevant or insignifcant fragments of knowledge. There isn't any meaningful payoff to striving to come to a common understanding, is there? After all, truth (religion) is personal. The Constitution says it is. Well....If there isn't one truth--a common possible-to-perceive reality, a set of values that transcends cultural differences--for human beings then we are truly alien. We may share the same body chemistry and may be physically classified as the same, but in the ultimately important aspects we are psychological, intellectual and spiritual aliens. We may be able to procreate together and share the same species label as Homo Sapiens but the name is a bad joke. The originators of the THOTH electronic newsletter believe that we truly need a "throbbing, vital center" and that a correct reconstruction of our past--not one based in denial--has to be a crucial part to such a unifying focus. Such a reconstruction is, of course, our mission. ----------------------------------------------- THE MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE (PART 2) By David Talbott (dtalbott at teleport.com) In their myths, rites and hymns the ancient Sumerians contrasted their own time to the earliest remembered age--what they called "the days of old," or "that day," when the gods "gave man abundance, the day when vegetation flourished." This was when the supreme god An "engendered the year of abundance." To this primeval age, every Sumerian priest looked back as the reference for the preferred order of things, which was lost through later conflict and deluge. In the city of Eridu at the mouth of the Euphrates, the priests recalled a Golden Age prior to familiar history. The predecessors of their race, it was claimed, had formerly reposed in the paradise of Dilmun, called the "Pure Place" of man's genesis. This lost paradise of Dilmun, about which scholars have debated for decades, is strangely reminiscent of the paradise of Eden. "That place was pure, that place was clean^Ê In Dilmun...the lion mangled not. The wolf ravaged not the lambs," the Sumerian texts read. The inhabitants of this paradise lived in a state of near perfection, in communion with the gods, drinking the waters of life and enjoying unbounded prosperity. Ancient Egypt, an acknowledged cradle of civilization, preserved a remarkably similar memory. Not just in their religious and mythical texts, but in every sacred activity, the Egyptians incessantly looked backwards, to events of the Tep Zepi. The phrase means the "First Time," a time of perfection "before rage or clamor or strife or uproar had come about," as the texts themselves put it. This was the Golden Age of Ra, and the memories of that time echoed through centuries of Egyptian thought. "The land was in abundance," the texts say. "There was no year of hunger. . .Walls did not fall; thorns did not pierce in the time of the Primeval Gods." Or from another text: "there was no unrighteousness in the land, no crocodile seized, no snake bit in the time of the First Gods." Cosmic harmony. Abundance. Paradise. To this Golden Age, according to the great nineteenth century scholar Francois Lenormant, the Egyptians "continually looked back with regret and envy." The golden age of Ra was, for the Egyptians, the Great Example setting a standard for all later ages. A surprising fact emerges. The legend of the Golden Age is as old as civilization. And the implications are well worth pondering. A coherent set of ideas has survived all of the twists and turns of cultural evolution for at least five thousand years--and on every continent. Now that's an astonishing verification of the durability of myth! Many of us had always thought of myth as the outcome of reckless invention--illiterate savages entertaining themselves by contriving magical stories out of nothing. Imagine such a process going on for thousands of years, and ask yourself if any possibility of a universal memory would remain. Remember that the myth-makers did not just recount a charming tale; they strove desperately to recover what was lost. In the infancy of civilization collective activity reflects a singular reference to the age of the gods--the honoring of the gods through celebration, representation, reenactment, codification, and massive construction activity. In fact, there are numerous grounds for saying that civilization itself was the outcome of this fundamentally religious activity. Perhaps the most accomplished analyst of mythology in modern times was the late Mircea Eliade, chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion. From his meticulous, lifelong survey of the subject, professor Eliade drew a stunning conclusion: literally every component of early civilizations--from religion to art and architecture--expressed symbolically the desire to recover and to re-live the lost Golden Age. That which symbolically transported the participant back to the First Time, the Golden Age, was sacred. That which did not was transient and mundane, of no interest. Around the world, early man yearned for a return to paradise. Every coronation of a king, every New Year's festival, monumental construction, every recitation of temple hymns and prayers, every holy war, every sacrifice to the gods was motivated by a desire to recapture some aspect of the Golden Age, to live, if only for a symbolic moment, in the original age of the gods. ----------------------------------------------- THE VENUS COMET (3) (An Exchange between Wal Thornhill and Tim Thompson) [Thornhill as original poster... ] >> In D. Grinspoon's recent book, 'Venus Revealed', he writes on p.245, >>"One of the most puzzling [patterns] was this: the highest mountains >>of Venus are all surprisingly shiny. At altitudes above about thirteen >>thousand feet, the reflectivity jumps up and the ground abruptly gets >>very bright. Surface roughness cannot explain this, so something in, >>or on, the ground at these high elevations is different, making it highly >>reflective". Grinspoon puts forward the idea that some chemical >>reaction takes place at the lower temperature, 820 degrees F, to form >>a radar reflective mineral. This requires the unlikely situation that >>all peaks on Venus have the same chemistry. A much simpler answer is >>that the diffuse electric discharges of St. Elmo's fire, occurring >>preferentially at the highest altitudes of mountain peaks, forms a >>highly conductive plasma which is a superb reflector of radar signals. [A posted response] >[Tim Thompson] The peculiar radar reflectivity of the Venusian highlands >is one of the interesting outstanding problems that remain in our >solutions, but as Grinspoon himself says, they are only tentative, and his >'fools gold' idea is a lark more than anything else. But his comments do >make use of the fact that the vertical temperature profile is pretty much >the same everywhere on Venus, in the lower atmosphere, so this kind of >chemical solution is a physically sound idea in principle. > > However, Thornhill's proposed solution is not. Plasmas are not >"superb reflectors of radar signals", they are suberb *refractors* >of radar signals. Ham radio signals skip off of an active ionosphere, >not because they reflect, but because the ionosphere refracts the >radio signal back down. This works because the ionosphere is thick, >and the radio waves arrive at an appropriate angle of incidence. A thin >'St. Elmo's fire' plasma over the surface of Venus would have no effect >at all on the Magellan radar beam, except perhaps to increase the >dispersion of the return echo. Such a plasma layer is so thin, it would >probably go unnoticed altogether. [WT] TT has chosen as an example of a plasma, an ionosphere, which is a tenuous, partially ionised plasma which refracts radio signals as he says, and is also transparent to certain frequencies. This is quite distinct from the plasma I was describing. The density of the atmosphere at the surface of Venus is about 1/10 that of water. St. Elmo's fire is a highly ionised state involving actual discharge. Put the two together and you have a dense plasma - which conducts like a metal and therefore reflects radar like a metal surface. The thickness of such a plasma would have no more effect on radar reflectivity than the thickness of a metal sheet would. Since the plasma would coat the surface rocks (whatever their composition), the radar return would be an enhanced version of that being received from nearby, uncoated, electromagnetically dissipative rocks, and would be greater than that returned from fool's gold. I consider my hypothesis is simpler than one relying on chemical or physical changes in rocks of unknown composition. [WT- original] >> Lightning is poorly understood. The mechanism of charging of >>storm clouds remains a mystery. Because lightning is conventionally >>associated with violent cloud movement on Earth, it was a surprise >>when investigators found strong evidence of lightning in the quiescent >>atmosphere of Venus. 'On Venus the clouds tend to resemble >>fogbanks,.... You don't see much lightning in fog'. [TT's response] > This is absolute hogwash. Lightning is very well understood, and >the charge separation mechanisms in terrestrial thunderstorms are >subject to intense scrutiny. Thornhill is talking through his hat. See >references 8-12. Lightning on Venus was not expected, but this kind of >surprise is not so uncommon in science. [WT-new] Maybe I should have said lightning generation is not understood. None of the references given [8-12] explain how charge separation occurs to create lightning. They all deal with detailed aspects of the phenomenology of lightning. I quote from TT's Ref [15]: "The electrification of clouds in the Earth's atmosphere and generation of lightning is one of the commonest and most spectacular terrestrial phenomena and has been the subject of numerous scientific investigations. Yet, in spite of investigation with modern theoretical and measurement techniques, lightning in the Earth's atmosphere is not fully understood and remains one of the most complex, unsolved and elusive scientific problems." Given TT's language, I am driven to ask why it is that skeptics are so cocksure of themselves in the face of our monumental ignorance? They certainly lack that prime requirement of a true scientist, that is, curiosity. If more were needed to bolster my argument, Martin Uman, a University of Florida professor of electrical engineering and one of the world's leading experts on lightning has said "We don't know how lightning attaches to the ground and not much about how it gets started in the cloud." This lack of understanding has been highlighted recently with the surprise discovery of "red sprites" and "blue jets" above electrical storms. Recent attempts to explain them still rely on the dogma of electrical self-sufficiency of the Earth and only serve to compound the mystery. I believe that the main reason for wanting to discount the discovery of lightning on Venus was that the clouds on Venus are essentially layers of haze, within a highly stratified atmosphere. The standard description of how lightning is generated just doesn't apply on Venus. I should also mention that there is no explanation for "bolts from the blue" on Earth, with no clouds involved at all. The very reason that lightning was not expected on Venus was due to our lack of understanding. [WT-original] >> The Venusian ionosphere is directly coupled to the solar wind. >>Intense airglow emission in long wavelength UV was observed to >>occupy a large volume of the ionosphere on both the day and night >>sides of the planet. The intensity seems to be linked to solar activity. >>I would therefore expect lightning activity on Venus to be generated, >>not from cloud motions, but from electrical input originating in the >>Solar plasma. [TT's response] > This is not a justifiable conclusion. Yes, the Venusian drive lightning deep inside the atmosphere. The mechanisms for >lightning on Venus are almost certainly the same as for the Earth. [WT- new] This paragraph is a statement of opinion with no evidence to back it up. The last sentence is true but since the mechanism on Earth is not understood, that just means we don't understand lightning, period. It is perfectly proper and scientific, under the circumstances, to offer a new hypothesis. [WT-original] >> If ions are scarce in the lower atmosphere (and there are no >>counterparts to earthly clouds on Venus), fewer but more equally >>energetic lightning discharges would be expected than on Earth. >>There is evidence that this is so; the rate detected by the Galileo >>spacecraft as it swung around Venus would require 2,000 years for a >>strike to occur in a given square kilometre. On Earth, 7 strikes would >>be expected each year in a square kilometre. Six out of nine events >>detected by the Galileo spacecraft were strongly clustered in >>frequency spectrum and power, a situation not found on Earth. If the >>extremely rapid lightning detected by the Venera spacecraft is >>verified, there may be two modes of discharge on Venus: firstly, a >>continuous glow of St. Elmo's fire at high points on the surface >>with rapid, low energy lightning, rather like that on Earth, and >>secondly, high energy superbolts which fire from the upper >>atmosphere - as detected by the Galileo spacecraft. [TT again] > There is no justification for any of this. The observed rate of >lightning on Venus differs little, if at all, from that on the Earth >[13,14,15], and there is no reason to presume that the mechanism that >generates lightning on Earth does not operate on Venus as well. [WT-new] My information came from D A Gurnett et al, 'Lightning and Plasma Wave Observations from the Galileo flyby of Venus', Science 253(1991). R A Kerr summarises the findings on p.1492. Also, Sky & Telescope, June 1992, pp.610, 611 have a news item on the same issue of Science, titled "Lightning on Venus Revisited": "According to team member Scott Bolton (JPL), who presented the results at a meeting of planetary scientists in November, the lightning strokes must have been at least as strong as those in terrestrial thunderstorms to have registered on Galileo at all. But they don't occur nearly as often as previously estimated. Based on the Galileo rate it would take 2000 years for a stroke to occur over a given square kilometer of Venus' surface. Longtime lightning skeptic P A Cloutier (Rice Univ) remains unconvinced by the Galileo results. He points out that six of the nine events are strongly clustered in frequency and power--a situation he says would have 'essentially zero' probability of occurring among terrestrial lightning strokes." Cloutier's argument is based, as I have shown, on total ignorance of the cause of terrestrial lightning. On the basis of my hypothesis, however, the clustering of power would be expected. [WT-original] >> Another argument for expecting lightning on Venus comes from the >>idea proposed by Juergens. He identified cometary tails with objects >>which are under enhanced electrical stress from the solar plasma due >>to the radial component of their movement toward or away from the >>Sun. [TT again] > He was wrong, a common problem for Juergens. Comet tails >consist of dust, and ionized gas, pushed away from the Sun by the >streaming solar wind plasma (dust tail), or direct pressure from solar >photons (the ion tail). [WT-new] The standard mechanisms of formation of comet tails obviously play some small part in the phenomena. The question is, are they sufficient? That comets are not well explained can be judged by the failure of most predictions about their appearances. The obvious similarity of the jets from the nucleus to electric spark machining should give pause to any curious scientist. Combine that with the strangely accelerated ions near the nucleus, cometary x-rays, and the flare up of comets at great distances from the sun during solar outbursts, and I think TT has more to do than just dismiss Juergens' and Dr Earl Milton's work as wrong. More later Wal Thornhill REFERENCES ... [8] "Lightning Flashes with High Origins" D.E. Proctor Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 102(D2): 1693-1706 (Jan 27 1997) [9] "The Spatial and Temporal Development of Intracloud Lightning" X.M. Shao & P.R. Krehbiel Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 101(D21): 26641- 26668 (Nov 27 1996) [10] "On the Initiation of Lightning Discharge in a Cloud .1. the High-Field Regions in a Thundercloud" M.D. Nguyen & S. Michnowski Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 101(D21): 26669- 26673 (Nov 27 1996) [11] "On the Initiation of Lightning Discharge in a Cloud .2. the Lightning Initiation on Precipitation Particles" M.D. Nguyen & S. Michnowski Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 101(D21): 26675- 26680 (Nov 27 1996) [12] "Electric Field Magnitude and Lightning Initiation in Thunderstorms" T.C. Marshall, M.P. McCarthy & W.D. Rust Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) 100(D4): 7097-7103 (Apr 20 1995) [13] "Optical Detection Of Lightning on Venus" S.A. Hansell, W.K. Wells & D.M. Hunten Icarus 117(2): 345-351 (Oct 1995) [14] "Venus Planetary Lightning Rate as Deduced from VLF Bursts" C.M. Ho, R.J. Strangeway & C.T. Russell Advances in Space Research 15(4): 93-98 (1995) [15] "Lightning on Venus Confirmed" R.N. Singh & C.T. Russell Current Science 66(7-8): 550-561 (Apr 10 1994) -END- ----------------------------------------------- THE ELECTRIC SERPENT Under the heading "Here be serpents" in The Economist for 8 March 1997, p. 102, appeared the following article: "NEAR the centre of the Milky way lurks something at least as weird as dark matter, but definitely visible. Through their radio telescopes, astronomers can see a bright strand, 150 light years long and a couple wide; and kinked in two places. They call it the Snake. Since its discovery in 1991 by Andrew Gray at the University of Svdney. the Snake has been a puzzle. Other "threads", as they are known, have been found inside the Galactic Centre Lobe, a barrel-shaped region of space where the interstellar gas is slightly more rarefied than outside it. Among the many exotic theories of their genesis is that they are loops of magnetism-perhaps blown like smoke rings off newly forming black holes-which bounced off the inside wall of the Lobe. But the Snake, being outside the Lobe, defies this explanation. Other theories, which did not depend on the Lobe, seemed capable of explaining smooth filaments, but not kinked ones. Gregory Benford, of the University of California, Irvine, who proposed a competing theory before the Snake was found, has just updated it, and thinks it can account for these anomalies. ** His idea is that the Snake is an electrical discharge, like a vast lightning bolt-so vast that it just hangs in space, instead of disappearing as earthly lightning does. ** Its source is a giant electrical dynamo. When something that conducts electricity sweeps through a magnetic field, a current starts to flow through it (this is the basis of a dynamo). Gas clouds in the middle of the galaxy are, everyone agrees, partly ionised radiation flying through has battered electrons off some of the atoms in the gas. Because electrons are what carry electricity, the clouds should therefore be electrical conductors. Dr Benford reckons some of them could have built up an electric current as they moved through the strong magnetic field that pervades the centre of the galaxy. Once this had happened, the current could gradually have extruded itself from one of the denser areas of cloud, and followed it as it drifted through space-hanging on, in Dr Benford's words, like a lamprey. ** However, this current itself twists around and around as it flows through the magnetic field, the way a torrent of water twists up a fire-fighter's hosepipe. That explains the kinks. Dr Benford reckons the Snake is actually something like a corkscrew shape seen side-on. ** Such knowledge may not be entirely esoteric. Dr Benford thinks a better understanding of the Snake could give clues about how to handle similar (if smaller) structures on earth. That is something nuclear fusion researchers would love to do. To achieve their goal, they need to learn how to control ionised gases similar to those thought to compose the Snake. But the Benford theory has not kicked its rivals down yet. Don Melrose, also at Sydney, points out that the gas in the middle of the galaxv might already be so strongly ionised, and thus such a good electrical conductor, that current would leak away rather than build up into a concentration like the Snake. Dr Morose also thinks that some of the other theories, though they have shortcomings, do not rule out filaments with kinks. If Dr Benford's theory is right, though, it also predicts that the Snake is slowly expiring. The radio signals that make it show up come from electrons flowing in it as they spiral through the galactic magnetic field. But this uses up energy, so the Snake is slowly glowing itself to death. Perhaps only its eventual disappearance will settle the debate." [** emphasis added **] [Wal Thornhill Comments]: Two items stand out: 1. The filamentary nature of "the snake". 2. The corkscrew shape. I suppose the third thing that stands out for me is the evident lack of understanding of galactic discharges on the part of astronomers. Such a structure is expected on the basis of the plasma cosmology presented in Eric Lerner's book "The Big Bang Never Happened" - but I'll bet you won't see mention of that in any of the scientific journals. ----------------------------------------------- If you enjoy reading Thoth Newsletter, consider passing it along to others you think might find it worthwhile. PLEASE VISIT THE KRONIA COMMUNICATIONS WEBSITE-- http://www.kronia.com/~kronia/ Other suggested Web site URL's for more information about Catastrophics: http://www.ames.net/aeon/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/sis/ http://www.flash.net/~cjransom/ http://www.knowledge.co.uk/xxx/cat/velikovskian/ http://www.access.digex.net/~medved/Catastrophism.html http://www.grazian-archive.com/ http://www.tcel.com/~mike/paper.html http://nt.e-z.net/mikamar/default.html ----------------------------------------------- The THOTH electronic newsletter is an outgrowth of an intense discussion that has been going on for several years within a community of scholars interested in astral catastrophics. We have initially narrowed our focus to supporting a reconstruction of recent planetary dislocations that ended a universally remembered "Golden Age." Serious readers must allow some time for these radically different ideas to be fleshed out and for a relevant background to be developed. The general tenor of the ideas and information presented in THOTH is supported by the editor and publisher, but there will always be plenty of room for differences of interpretation that may be included in the articles. Again, we welcome your comments and responses, and any supporting information or relevant submissions. ********* Mike A. Mikamar Publishing mikamar at e-z.net